Civil rights attorney Dayna Cunningham, the founder and executive director of the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) at MIT, was named the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. She will succeed Alan Solomont, who is retiring after eight years in the role. ... President Joe Biden nominated David Weil, dean of Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, to serve as administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, a position he held with the Obama administration labor department from 2014 to 2017. ... See more on these and other changes in NEJHE's "Comings and Goings" tally of new appointments in New England higher ed and beyond.

Pictured: Dayna Cunningham

State and federal lawmakers have called for a system for how participants in intercollegiate athletics may be compensated for endorsement deals, social media and use of their images in video games. Lawmakers said that if Congress doesn’t act, different state laws may create a patchwork of policy. The Senate Commerce Committee will also hold a hearing on the issue this week. ... Read the latest from NEJHE's DC Shuttle, featuring national news drawn from our friends at the New England Council.

E Pluribus Unum: Some Facts and Figures from the NEJHE Beat

From time to time, NEJHE revives the presentation of facts and figures called “Data Connection” that we had published quarterly for nearly 20 years in the print editions of The New England Journal of Higher Education, formerly known as Connection. Among the recent data points: Women surged from 24% of medical students nationwide in 1978 to 51% in 2019. But in the same period, the Black male share of medical students shrank from 3.1% to 2.9%.

Researchers project that by the year 2036, more than half of all graduating public high school students in the U.S. will be "minority" (28% Hispanic, 13% Black, 8% Asian and Pacific Islander and 6% multiracial). It's yet another wake-up call for America's predominantly white institutions (PWIs)—by far, the largest group of higher ed institutions in the country. If these PWIs—Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs) if you will—continue to center whiteness culture as the premise for all else, they will face their own racial reckoning, writes Sara Jean-Francois, assistant director of NEBHE’s Tuition Break program. Jean-Francois, who recently earned her master’s degree from Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, has researched race-conscious campuses. "The hard truth," Jean-Francois notes, "is that traditional PWIs do not adequately make space for the cultures, knowledge base and languages of students of color, though these institutions often are the ones that can afford to financially support students of color and those who come from low-income backgrounds or are the first in their families to attend college."

Even in this time when people presume to be having a “racial reckoning,” signs of enduring racial inequity pop up everywhere. From the nagging disparities in health where Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) die at higher rates than other groups from COVID-19 … to the steep declines in Black and Latino students submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) … to Black food service workers experiencing disproportionate short-tipping for enforcing social distancing rules ... inequality reigns. These persistent forces should be a big deal for New England’s Historically White Colleges and Universities, which are rarely called out as HWCUs. Executive Editor John O. Harney reports on the racial equity conversation that he has monitored mostly via Zoom since the pandemic began.

To fight climate change, all sectors of energy use—agriculture, transportation, industrial, residential, business—must transition to electricity. To achieve such an all-electric economy, environmental expert Thomas Jorling calls for a “smart grid” to facilitate the nationwide delivery of alternatively generated electricity. A former New York state conservation commissioner and Williams College environmental scholar, Jorling suggests the grid follow the pattern of the interstate highway system, whose main costs have already been incurred securing rights-of-way and which would not require defiling the countryside or disrupting ecosystems. "These rights-of-way represent a valuable federal and state asset that shouldn’t be limited to concrete and asphalt," writes Jorling, who is now an advisor to the law firm Murphy, Hesse, Toomey & Lehan. "This network, already invested in by the public, can accommodate not only an electric grid, but also pipelines and even elevated high-speed rail." And perhaps the expansion of broadband and related innovations in higher ed delivery?

We seek an Associate Director for the New England State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) to lead implementation, management and oversight of this reciprocal program in the NEBHE region. SARA provides a platform for states within the NEBHE Compact to—upon application and demonstration of certain criteria—enter into reciprocity for authorizing individual colleges and universities to provide postsecondary education courses and programs through the internet or via other distance modalities to students living in other states. Please see the job description here and send your application to careers@nebhe.org.

NEBHE's Monthly Policy Dispatch Rounds Up Recent Webinar Series on International Students

To subscribe to The Monthly Policy Dispatch, click here or contact NEBHE Associate Director of Policy Research and Analysis Stephanie Murphy at smurphy@nebhe.org.